Boy, it was chilly this morning despite the sun shining. A real nip in the air.
We headed for Ceret, a little town just up the road as Hubby had discovered that the local InterMarche supermarket had two dedicated campervan sized parking bays. Nearer the town, I tapped the InterMarche into Apple Maps only to find it located way out of town. So abandoning that idea, we decided to try our luck in Ceret itself and did our usual – got ourselves in a knot and sent our blood pressures sky high. We got trapped down a street as they had closed it off for roadworks so we had to do a ten point turn, we then went down a completely wrong street and finally did a couple of laps of the town. This was ridiculous – we made an executive decision to go to the Intermarche after all and work from there, only to discover it was a 43 minute walk back to Ceret.
To give ourselves some thinking time, we washed the Van in the car wash, filled it with fuel and found a possible car park in Ceret – which we successfully did. By reversing the Van in so the back tyres touched the kerb and its bum overhung the verge, we managed to get the Van in a car sized space. I went to get a parking ticket which also turned out to be slightly traumatic as I needed to translate all of its demands and a queue was gathering behind me – I stabbed a lot of buttons and came away with a ticket that cost me two euros and gave me 24 hours worth of parking, not really knowing how I accomplished that.
Parked up, we walked into town and what a lovely little town it was. Tall plane trees gave a beautiful shade under their autumnal foliage as we wandered around. We found a cafe in a perfect little sunny spot to warm up (it was quite cool that warranted winter coats and a scarf) and had a coffee, ended up patting the cafe’s giant Bernese Mountain dog and fell into conversation with an English lady who lived nearby. We carried on with our wanderings, coming across little squares, timeless alleyways and little side roads – we had to watch our step as there were deep concrete gutters running through the streets and were potential leg breakers. We stopped off at a bookshop and perusing a box of maps came across one marked “Minehead” which made us chuckle – how on earth did a Minehead map find itself in the south of France? We visited a bakery for some sandwiches and cake and enjoyed some banter with the lady behind the counter (we’re all over the place linguistically which made her laugh) and the Pup met a four month German Shepherd puppy and they played together for a while.
Armed with lunch, we said goodbye to Ceret, nestling in the foothills of the Pyrenees – if you looked east, the landscape flattened out dramatically, but look behind and the majestic Pyrenean mountains rose above the little town. It was such a contrast. We picked up the D900 and headed north along the coast to Montpellier, hoping to find a nice picnic area to have lunch along the way somewhere in between. First we hit Perpignan, sitting in a broad flat valley floor and the satnav thought it was fun to take us right through the centre of it. It was a pretty town with avenues of plane trees, but we didn’t really notice much more as we contended with traffic lights, buses and the general chaos of urban driving.
We skimmed past Perpignan’s airport and little satellite towns – at Rivesaltes, the satnav decided to take us down this awful potholed back road (probably to shear off half a mile) that tested the Van’s suspension and our spines. Something made an dreadful crashing sound in the back that made us wince. We were burped out back onto proper roads and ran parallel with the A9 motorway across unremarkable countryside towards Narbonne.
We passed the Etang de Leucate, a vast body of water, sandwiched between us and the coast – here we got transferred onto the D6009. We missed a couple of decent stopping places (no signage) and went for many miles where there were no parking places at all or there was a tiny little lay-by, right next to the speeding traffic. Finally we came across a big parking area, set back off the road and behind some scraggy trees, where we made a cuppa and enjoyed our sarnies, watching lorries come and go. Suitably refreshed, we carried on to Narbonne with the half hearted idea of visiting for old times sake – years ago, with friends, we nearly went over the town’s weir in a boat we had hired for a weeks cruising – but common sense butted in and we skipped round Narbonne’s outer ring road and continued up the coast.
These last few days, we seen a few people trying to hitch hike – walking along with their thumb stuck out, something we haven’t seen for years. We hitch hiked in Corfu when we were young and stupid, great fun but had a couple of moments of like “what have we got ourselves into”. Now older, wiser and no room in the Van, we carried on past them and wondered if they were ever successful at getting a lift.
The countryside improved after Narbonne – this was wine country and there were fields and fields of vines. It was very pleasant. We approached Beziers which the satnav decided that we needed to see, so again we were on red alert for all the traffic hazards that Beziers could throw at us including mad people whizzing along on electric scooters at crazy speeds with no helmets – they would just pull out without looking!
It was at this point that we discussed the French and Spanish outlook on rules and regulations. There were, at times, where rules were blatantly ignored – double parking (even on a roundabout), just stepping out onto zebra crossings in front of you and back in Sant Pol, crossing the railway line after the barriers had come down and a red sign flashing “No Crossing!” There was this total laissez faire attitude which was quite refreshing, to be honest and most of it was basic common sense, though for the uninitiated like us, a touch alarming.
Finally we arrived at Pezenas, a few miles south of Montpellier where we had booked into a municipal camping site. We found it behind a line of retail outlets and supermarkets and it was actually very nice – we parked up in a little cul-de-sac full of campervans and took a deep breath. It had been a bit of a trip today.
We made a cuppa and as the sun started to slip out of the sky, decided to walk to the old part of town, some ten minutes walk away. It was fairly straightforward and we soon found ourselves in a delightful wide thoroughfare with little independent shops and cafes. It was lovely to visit all these different towns and not see any big multinational outlets that are so repetitive in our own High Streets – all the big names were usually found on retails parks in the outer suburbs or clubbed together down one street, but the actual town centres were full of independent traders and it was fabulous. We wandered around as night fell, down little tiny cobbled streets, with tall houses and old buildings on either side and it was beautiful – there was hardly anyone around in these back streets and you could imagine meeting a Victorian gentleman and woman coming round the corner, it was that timeless. It was lovely.
We found ourselves back on the main thoroughfare – we were still full from our lunch, so we sat down at outside cafe table and had a beer, soaking up this lovely little spot. We finally decided to wander back to the campsite, as the temperature was starting to drop and settle down for the night. Tomorrow we would take another little step back towards home.
